Linux – How to Find and Delete All Directories Named ‘test’

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I have many directories named "test" and I would like to remove them.

I know how to find them and print them using:

find . -name test -print

Now, how to do I remove the directories?

Please note that I have files in the directory as well and they must be removed as well.

Best Answer

xargs does all the magic:

find . -name test -type d -print0|xargs -0 rm -r --

xargs executes the command passed as parameters, with the arguments passed to stdin.

This is using rm -r to delete the directory and all its children.

The -- denotes the end of the arguments, to avoid a path starting with - from being treated as an argument.

-print0 tells find to print \0 characters instead of newlines; and -0 tells xargs to treat only \0 as argument separator.

This is calling rm with many directories at once, avoiding the overhead of calling rm separately for each directory.

As an alternative, find can also run a command for each selected file:

find . -name test -type d -exec rm -r {} \;

And this one, with better performance, since it will call rm with multiple directories at once:

find . -name test -type d -exec rm -r {} +

(Note the + at the end; this one is equivalent to the xargs solution.)

Related Solutions

Linux – List all directories and subdirectories, excluding directories without files

Here's one way: list all regular files, strip away the file basenames, and remove duplicates.

find . -type f | sed 's!/[^/]*$!!' | sort -u

If you want to strip the leading ./:

find . -type f | sed -e 's!/[^/]*$!!' -e 's!^\./!!' | sort -u

Linux – Find Directories with All Files Inside Older Than X

It's probably possible to do this without creating files using process substitution or something, but here's a quick-and-dirty solution:

find . -type f -mtime +30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > old.txt
find . -type f -mtime -30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > new.txt
grep -vf new.txt old.txt

The first command outputs the path of every file modified more than 30 days ago (in find's -printf -- at least with the GNU find on my system -- %h prints the whole path except for the actual filename), then sorts those and gets rid of any duplicates, and puts the whole thing into a file called old.txt.

The second command does the same but with every file modified less than 30 days ago, and puts them into another file, new.txt.

The grep line prints every line from old.txt that doesn't appear in new.txt -- so it will give you a list of directories that contain only files that were last modified more than 30 days ago.

This is all using the GNU versions of the utilities. I don't know if the syntax matches up on the BSD versions, etc.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – List all directories and subdirectories, excluding directories without files

Linux – Find Directories with All Files Inside Older Than X

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